Where do hipsters come from?

AUGUST 19, 2008

The Way We Were: Hipsters and Hepcats of the ‘40s and ‘50s
The word “hipster” has become a catch-all term for everything from the indie-rocker fashion crowd to parent-funded postcollegiates allegedly taking over beloved neighborhoods. But the term is far from new. The original hipsters were a more exclusive set,—envied, copied, derided or mocked depending upon where one’s social loyalties lay—born among mostly-Black jazz musicians and their followers from the 1930s through the ‘50s. Hipsters could be any race, though, and the term came to mean the (mostly white) Beat Generation “beatniks” and Bohemians who had dropped out of “square” society, preferring the culture of jazz, poetry, and drugs that was growing into a solid underground scene.

Cotton Club jazz icon Cab Calloway’s 1938 lexicon “The Hepster’s Dictionary” offered a guide to Harlem-born “jive talk” for the average square. "How to Speak Hip,” recorded by comedians Del Close and John Brent in 1959, captures the spirit with a send-up of hip by one of its own.

A sampling from Calloway’s “official jive language reference book of the New York Public Library”:
• Dig (v.): (1) meet. Ex., “I’ll plant you now and dig you later.” (2) look, see. Ex., “Dig the chick on your left duke.” (3) comprehend, understand. Ex., “Do you dig this jive?”
• Frolic pad (n.): place of entertainment, theater, nightclub.
• Mitt pounding (n.): applause.
• Twister to the slammer (n.): the key to the door.

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Where do hipsters come from?

AUGUST 19, 2008

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